Fitzpatrick and New Technologies

Reading Response 3:
Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. “Google Wave: Pedagogical Success, Technological Failure?” In Learning Through Digital Media: Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s piece on Google Wave is an excellent article for contemplating the incorporation of new, complex technologies in writing classrooms. On one hand, this is a success story focusing on the affordances of incorporating socially-geared digital environments into one’s pedagogy. On the other, this is a cautionary tale for scholars who may be made vulnerable by a tool mismatched for the learning. I can’t help but think of Latour’s Aramis here.

—Check out my brief overview of Bruno Latour’s Aramis, or the Love of Technology if you would like to know where this is coming from—

Fitzpatrick’s piece does a phenomenal job of highlighting just how powerful a strategic application of new technology can be. Given that Google designed Wave to help people engage writing in social spaces, it provided an ideal format for one unit during a semester. Fitzpatrick wanted students to think and gather information socially and collaboratively. I recognize her decision to experiment with communication environment rather than type of product to be a sound strategy worth emulating. However, because of the overwhelming influence of corporate strategies in developing mass-market systems there’s also a downside. 

As in the case with Aramis, “the most crucial problem was perhaps that Wave’s users—and more importantly its evangelists—didn’t have a clear enough sense of what the system was actually good for” (paragraph 9). The pitfall in using technologies like Google Wave is that large, systemic shifts in business models and technical support often subvert the ability of people to meaningfully engage technology consistently over time. Either educators must become endlessly adaptable, or more rigid in their infrastructural demands.

For me I take this as a practical lesson in pedagogical portability. I value a technology’s applicability over its complexity any day of the week. Maybe it’s my favor toward inductive pedagogy?